I have 150-200 hours of reel-to-reel recordings of Duncan Williamson. Duncan was a Scottish Traveller, storyteller and singer with an immense wealth of traditional stories, ballads and riddles. He was my mentor and a huge inspiration to storytellers throughout the world.

The tapes were recorded during the 1970s and 80s by Duncan's wife, Linda, as they worked on publishing collections of his stories (most are published by Canongate - have a google). Duncan's books are wonderful, but hearing the story brings a whole new dimension to the experience. There is other material included that has not been published in any format - ballads, jokes, riddles, stories and snippets, discussions on the nature of story with visiting storytellers, writers and musicians... and I suspect much more, though until they are digitised I have no way of discovering exactly what the tapes contain.

The tapes are currently in climate controlled storage, but their quality is deteriorating. They need to be digitised as soon as possible to retain this important resource.

I am applying for an Arts Council Bid to digitise, edit, catalogue and listen to the tapes. The bid will give me the opportunity to work with the material and explore different ways of sharing Duncan's legacy - learning and telling the stories alongside memories of Duncan himself; singing the ballads; creating an online database - we'll see how it develops!

For the application I need to prove matched funding. Some of that will be from me - materials and time. But the more people donate here will help raise money and also demonstrate that people are interested in saving Duncan's legacy, hearing where working with those stories takes me and being part of a conversation about how and where traditional stories fit into our modern world

I'd like to ask people to donate £15 - the cost of a CD. When I have enough tape transferred, cleaned up and edited my aim is to send you a code to download the equivalent of an album of Duncan's material.